Hello, Aethermancers!
We are simply amazed by all of your support for us and the demo. Thanks to all of you, our demo has reached over 500 positive reviews! Just in time for Steam Next Fest, too. We have also received a lot of helpful feedback, which has already influenced our development of the game. So we hope this update will improve everyone's experience with the demo! That's right, we released an update to our demo, available to everyone
now. You can find the complete patch notes below in this news post.
Steam Next Fest
We are part of the current Steam Next Fest! This is a big opportunity - as this event gets a lot of eyes on indie games like ours!
New Monster: Cockatrice
A new monster has entered the demo! You will now be able to also encounter Cockatrice on Pilgrimage Path, as another regular monster. Its Elements are Fire/Wind and it comes with the unique Type combination of Tank/Burn/Dodge. You don't want to make it angry - its Signature Trait, dubbed "Hot Temper", allows it to apply temporary Power stacks to itself whenever it takes damage. And if you manage to trigger its Signature Trait 10 times, you've really done it - Cockatrice erupts in an explosion of anger and applies tons of Burn stacks on every enemy. Basically, Cockatrice is a heavily Retaliate-focused monster!
Capture Cockatrice and try it out for yourself!
Speedrun Contest
Our speedrun contest starts today, at 10AM PST! We teamed up with therun.gg to bring you this contest. The full official rules can be found on their website:
Aethermancer on therun.ggBasically, here is a quick rundown of the event:
- It's open from February 24th until March 2nd.
- The winner gets an interactive prop statue in Forbidden Fortress.
- Everyone from the top 5 will also receive a key for the game once it's released or goes into Early Access.
- Players start with a fresh save file.
- The category is "All Encounters": You are required to fight every single encounter in each Zone. No skipping fights!
We are excited to see you all come up with new strategies and tricks! Since we announced this event on our Discord server, quite some discussions and strategizing have already been going on there. If you want to get up to speed, we recommend that you check it out yourselves:
Join our moi rai games Discord server!If you are interested to join in, make sure to also read all the rules on the
official website, as well as the changes to the demo coming with this update! If you have any questions, feel free to ask on our
Discord server, where we already set up a channel for the event.
Full Patch notes - version 0.1.1.5
[h2]New Content[/h2]
- New monster: Cockatrice.
- It can be found as a regular monster in Pilgrimage Path, replacing Warden in its regular monster slot (Warden can now only be encountered as Champion monster in Pilgrimage Path, not as a regular monster).
- Elements: Fire/Wind.
- Types: Tank, Burn, Dodge.
- Signature Trait: Hot Temper: Retaliate: Applies 1 temporary Power to self. On every 10 Retaliates: Also applies 5 Burn to each enemy.
- 2 new Maverick Traits:
- Electrical Burn (Burn + Dodge): Aura: Whenever an enemy reaches 5 Burn stacks: Deals a Fire/Wind hit with 11 damage to that enemy and applies Dodge to self. Triggers only up to once per enemy per combat.
- Overwhelming Heat (Power + Burn): On Attack: Applies 1 Burn to target enemy for every Power stack on this monster.
- Added Rare Affixes.
- Rare Affixes are enhanced versions of standard equipment affixes, offering improved values or having completely new, stronger effects. Previously, these affixes were exclusive to the Torment’s Blessing interaction.
- Equipment obtained from loot drops has a 15% chance to replace a normal affix with a Rare Affix.
- Equipment received from the Knight has a 15% chance to feature a Rare Affix.
- Equipment bought from the Merchant has a 30% chance to include a Rare Affix.
- We have reworked the mechanics around catching monsters, which we dub the “Memento Rework”. It affects a lot of gameplay mechanics related to Mementos, Monster Souls, and Monster Shrines. Our goals are to simplify the mechanics, as they caused a lot of confusion, as well as to improve the “monster tamer” feel of our game. We encourage you to make a new save file to try out the changes yourself, without skipping the tutorial - so that we can get more feedback on these changes. Here is a summary of the changes:
- The player starts out without any Mementos, except for the chosen Starter. They have to use the Capture Action to build up their roster of monsters. The start of the game (mainly the tutorial) was adjusted accordingly.
- The function of a Memento is simplified: It simply unlocks the corresponding monster for the player. It doesn’t function as a tool to store a monster’s Soul anymore.
- The player no longer needs to collect a monster’s Soul to rebirth it.
- Instead, there is a new generic rebirth resource called “Monster Souls”. The player starts out each run with 3 of them and can find more of them and use them in different ways (similar to the current Souls tied to specific monsters).
- Monster Shrines simply offer an amount of random monsters equal to the amount of “Souls” the player currently has. These random monsters all come from the list of captured monsters. There is no longer a distinction between “Free Souls” and other rebirth options.
- Using a Monster Shrine always uses up 1 “Monster Soul” (meaning you will have 1 less random choice at the next Shrine, unless you get a new Soul along the way).
- The Soul Gate and Soul Altar were adjusted to use the new “Monster Soul” resource. Soul Altars will offer a choice of 3 random temporary boons, based on the Types of the player’s current monster (which means it’s more likely to get boons that synergize with your monsters).
[h2]Small Changes and Improvements[/h2]
- Tutorials now display dynamic keys (for example, they will now display controller buttons instead of keyboard keys when using a controller).
- Self damaging actions are no longer affected by power/damage buffs and don’t cause corruption.
- Added Fog to the tutorial area.
- The meta upgrade shops display long headers better now.
- Added more Tutorial Highlights.
- Added zoom to specific POI during some tutorials / dialogues.
- Improved Monster replacement screen.
- You can now leave the detailed worthiness screen by pressing escape.
- Purging enemy Aether logic is smarter now:
- It takes not only the target enemy, but also the other enemies into account. But the cancelling the target’s action has higher prio.
- If an action purges multiple Aether at once, it iterates through all possible combinations and picks the best.
- Added an icon for corruption to the UI. The corruption number is now showcased in the exploration HUD, pause menu and monster menu.
- Improved UI visuals for when you go to a new area, to the Victory screen and to the Defeat screen.
- Adjustments to Rebirth Menu visuals.
- Improved readability on event textbox.
[h2]Type, Monster & Skill Balancing Changes[/h2]
- A few tweaks to help out some of the weaker monsters:
- Orthrus: Base health increased to 35 from 30.
- Primeval Blight (Tatzelwurm’s Signature Trait): Crit Chance per Poison stack increased to 3% from 2%.
- The Shield Type was too dominant, so some Shield Type skills were nerfed:
- Stone Fist: Shielding reduced to 2 x 3 from 2 x 4, and base damage reduced to 14 from 15
- Glacier Shield: Shielding reduced to 2 x 4 from 2 x 6
- Lightning Shield: Shielding reduced to 1 x 5 from 2 x 3
- Emergency Response: Threshold for extra Shielding reduced to 50% from 60%
- To make Healing Actions more worthwhile to use, almost every Healing Action has been buffed - either with stronger healing or additional utility, or both:
- Refreshment: Heal increased to 3 x 6 from 3 x 4 and now applies 1 Regeneration to all allies instead of 2 Regeneration to only the target ally
- Breeze: Heal increased to 3 x 5 from 3 x 4 and Aether cost changed to Fire/Wind from Wind/Wind
- Healing Slime: Heal increased to 3 x 6 from 3 x 4
- Natural Cure: Heal increased to 3 x 6 from 3 x 4 and amount of Debuffs and Corruption cleansed increased to 4 from 3 each
- Cleansing Rain: Heal increased to 2 x 5 from 2 x 4, amount of Debuffs cleansed increased to 4 from 2, and Corruption cleansed increased to 2 from 1
- Blood Drain: Heal increased to 3 x 4 from 3 x 3
- Vampiric Seed: Heal increased to 2 x 4 from 1 x 6
- Windfall: Heal increased to 2 x 6 + 1 x 6 from 2 x 4 + 1 x 4
- Power Brand: Heal increased to 3 x 5 from 3 x 4 and amount of temporary Power Stacks increased to 3 from 2
- Nature Guard: Heal increased to 2 x 6 from 2 x 4 and Corruption cleanse increased to 3 from 2
- Healing Brew: Heal increased to 2 x 5 from 2 x 3
- Volcanic Essence: Heal increased to 3 x 7 from 3 x 4
- Rain of Life: Heal increased to 4 x 5 from 4 x 4
- Toxic Healing: Heal increased to 3 x 4 from 2 x 5
- Bonfire: Burn stacks increased to 2 from 1
- Healing Dust: Heal increased to 2 x 6 from 2 x 5
- Elixir: Heal increased to 2 x 6 from 2 x 5
- Foreboding Rain: Terror stacks increased to 2 from 1
- Snow Support: Heal increased to 2 x 6 from 2 x 5
- Some Poison Type skills were buffed:
- Plague: Now applies Poison to all enemies, instead of all other enemies
- Proliferate: Damage increased to 5 from 4
- Fatal Upkeep: Debuff Damage Bonus increased to 4 from 3
- Polluted Aether: Damage increased to 6 from 5 and Poison stacks increased to 6 from 5
- Mephisto was both one of the monsters with the highest win-rate for players, as well as one of the deadliest to end player runs on the enemy side:
- Schadenfreude: Dodge chance reduced to 6% from 10%
- Other changes:
- Haste Dodge chance increased to 12% from 8%
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
VFX of champion monsters no longer plays after their defeat in combat.
The outlines of champion monsters in the exploration are displayed correctly when they are targeted with void blitz.
Made sure action VFX are cleared when returning to the exploration from combat.
Elemental challenges should now be sorted correctly.
Tutorial messages correctly display controller buttons instead of keyboard keys, when using a controller.
Camera during the end-cutscene should no longer be offset.
Fixed an issue that caused your rebirthed monster to show up at the next monster shrine.
Adjusted the lighting for NPCs in Pilgrim’s Rest so they are lit more like the player.
Fixed some texts that were not translated into non-English languages.
Fixed purple screen on entering gold zone.
Fixed several soft-locks caused by dense prop placement.
Fixed wrong layering of collectible NPCs.
Fixed errors of sfx not being able to play when exiting Pilgrimage Path near a tiny frog.
Monster sprites no longer cover their action preview in combat.
Fixed an issue in the generation that would cause props to spawn in each other.
Fixed teleport to epic loot drops causing players to get out of bounds.
Fixed multiple text issues in multiple languages (especially French and Chinese).
Fix being able to Void Blitz when Save & Quitting.
Fix for monsters being able to stand on top of each other.
Fix watching credits causing an error.
Fix rebirth screen monsters not being aligned on the y axis.
Fix visual bug in Worthiness bar.
Fix Pause menu freezing game if you opened another menu in the overworld in the same frame.
Fix aether display not always displaying current value.
Fix buff / debuff icons disappearing.
Fix being able to get Corruption Tutorial from cook.
Fix path loot drops respawning when reloading area.
Fix frame perfect dash teleport issues.
Fix being able to forfeit after winning a Combat.
Fixed some trait icons showing behind the container border.
Fixed some trait titles overlaying the icons.
Fixed “Level Up” text overlaying the Worthiness details screen (During the post combat menu).
Fixed the random line in the middle of the Worthiness bar.
The camera now behaves correctly when you teleport quickly.
[h2]Notes[/h2]
If you load an existing savefile in middle of a run after the update, you might be reset to Pilgrim's rest.
[h2]Edit: Hotfix Patch 0.1.1.7[/h2]
We released a small hotfix patch ver. 0.1.1.7, mainly because Wolpertinger's Signature trait was broken and was not purging the Aether properly.
Changes:
- Eagle Eyes now purges the right aether
- Orthrus has +5 max health (balancing change that was missed in the update)
- Shambler can be targeted by void blitz now
because of that we are going to reset the speedrun ladder (meaning all runs done before the hotfix will be invalid) and extend the contest for one day. Sorry for the inconvenience, but after discussing with the community we decided this would be the best course.
